Cataract
by jadesfire22
Summary: The Emperor's Hand Mara Jade sets out on one of her first missions, testing her Force abilities-and her loyalty to the Empire.
1. Chapter 1

**A Series of Random Statements Covering All Possible Angles of this Story:**

**Mildly AU, since I don't think the characterization of Mara Jade is quite right. She's too philosophical, and not sarcastic enough. **

**I can't promise accurate characterization; all I can promise is my usual ridiculously elaborate prose style, excessive use of archetypal motifs, and hopefully a good plot.**

**K+ for Star Wars-esque violence. **

**Star Wars belongs to Disney, and ****Mara Jade belongs to Timothy Zahn. **

**Read and review (Hopefully positive, but constructive criticism is welcomed as long as it's tactful.)**

**Cataract**

**Prologue:**

Sith and Jedi divide the Force into light and dark.

I can imagine them, diplomatically sitting in a well-lit room. They would cluster around one of those awkwardly long tables meant to intimidate your enemy. (Personally, I think that if your method of fear-mongering is a table, your enemies have nothing to worry about.) The sleekness of the table and the distance it places between the two groups serves to hide their mutual eagerness and jointly hunched postures. The two groups, amoebas of tan and black rounding out the spectrum of the metallic silver table, pore over a map stretching across the expanse. Politely, they place small markers on the map, parceling out the Force.

Fear? Oh, that's Dark.

Love? Oh, that's Light.

Unless love turns into attachment, and fear can also be for a loved one's life….

Here, like practiced politicians, they throw their hands up in despair. By nodded consent from both groups, one Jedi draws a battered grey poker chip out of his cloak. "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly upon our own point of view," he mutters, and passes it to a Sith. The Sith acquiesces: "It all depends upon your definition of good," and slides the chip into the middle of the map.

The Grey Areas. Wild Space. "Here be Dragons," the weary mapmakers cry. The unexplored regions, the outer limits of the Force…and yet those so central to our own hearts.

Reality shifted its fabric, pulling me back into itself. Our ship had just exited hyperspace, yet Imperial Center was not yet in view. So I gazed upon the shifting stars, tiny holes that emit their allure through a deep, dark curtain.

Some have called me an inhabitant of those grey areas of the Force. As I travel through an expanse of white and black, I wouldn't entirely disagree with them.


	2. Chapter 2

My thoughts floated back to my mission. He had told me to steal an object of some value from a certain Reglivan Noss. An acquirer of wealth, he had sneered. Considered himself a connoisseur. A connoisseur of what, no one was exactly sure. But his greed had taken him too far—he had stolen from the Imperial Museum, and the Emperor commanded his punishment. Thus, my goals: recovery, return, revenge.

I hadn't been told exactly what Noss had stolen and what I had to reclaim. It was my task to find it, the Emperor had informed me, as a true test of my abilities.

"And once I've found it, what should I do with it—and its owner?"

The Emperor smiled. "Oh no, my child. That will be up to your discretion." His image faded out of my mind.

Imperial Center—and my first true mission—loomed ahead.

The planet-wide city spat light off its surface, glaring into the velvety dark of space. As the gleaming disk of our destination widened in my vision, I squinted against the brightness, letting my eyes adjust. As we descended, fiery curves of atmosphere warped themselves around our ship, trailing up from the spires of the city. Gracefully, the legs of our ship touched a silver platform, and a crowd of diplomats came out, murmuring their greetings. I smiled and went inside the building that awaited my occupancy.

Jets of light from the variegated sunset are thrown across the room by tapering windows. Slim shadows are cast by the tall walls—or rather the areas between the windows. The walls are sleek metal, of course, like everything else in the city. And their dark grey color means they meld into the shadows they cast, one block of negative space defining the room around them. In the middle of this frozen prism of light, I am a study in stillness. I seem a marble statue, placed and posed in my chair of lacquered greel wood.

I freeze but remain tense, all flexed muscle ready to burst into action at the intrusion of any assassin who suspects my true purpose here. My Force presence, however, is the opposite, all motion but dreamily deliberate, turning in the currents of the environment around me. With closed eyes, I sense the building around me, the corridors of power—or the lack of it. Built all for show, constructed all for practicality. A few radiating passages lace the tower like honeycombs, but I sense small secret niches everywhere. In short, all the familiar trimmings of a nervous politico-social climber…but something very alien at the core. Of the building or the man?

I opened my eyes.

"Mara Jade." One of Noss' compatriots walked into the room. His name was—I consulted my memory—Adan Rhode. Admiral. In the military, so obviously more honorable than Noss. Not as _nouveau riche_ as Noss, but willing to smilingly tolerate the opulence to keep the peace. Young, not more than three or four years older than me myself, but rising. A tuft of mustache linked the two sides of his already patriarchal face. "Have I interrupted your reverie, my dear madam?"

I half-turned from my contemplative position, smiling at his paradoxically efficient yet sincere concern. "Not at all. I was just…preparing myself."

"The entrance into society," Rhode grinned. "Quite an occasion. I'm sure your family will be proud."

"My family is the Empire, sir."

He seemed to take my upbringing figuratively and smiled. "Quite the large brood to take care of, eh? But—" he straightened his tunic—"a worthy kin at that."

I wholeheartedly agreed with this officer. Clearly a model one, with heart and mind in the right place. He courteously extended his arm, and I graciously accepted it. To his gesture, he added, "Come, let's join the guests."

Smiling blandly, I let him lead me out of the room and down a sweeping staircase into the crowd. A wash of saccharine emotions swept over me via the Force, a tide of auras sodden with wine and polluted thoughts blocking out the proximal clarity of Rhode's mind.

I had already served the Emperor on covert missions for quite a few years. However, this was to be the first operation that would demand the full extents of my training—diplomacy and subterfuge as well as action. Immediately, I saw why I had trained with droids before working up to this. The atmosphere of the platinum-trimmed room served as a corrosive to my sharply-honed planning. I took a deep breath before beginning.


	3. Chapter 3

Gently, I extricated my elbow from Rhode's, to float away in the throng of merrymakers. Drawing upon the Emperor's teachings, I dulled down my mental acuity to a subdued electrical crackle hovering just above the water-level of the crowd's collectively moronic IQ, instead of its typical beam of light.

There weren't any Force-sensitives left, but you just never knew.

A middle-aged woman sidled up to me. "Excuse me, but do you happen to happen to know where the hosts are? That Noss always gets away from me."

"Oh," I replied, "I haven't seen him. Maybe he's over by the bar?"

"Funny thing about him, though," a young man with meticulously curled chestnut hair linked on to the conversation. "They say he's rising quickly, too quickly. You're certainly right to try to find him here, Rele. I don't know what kind of hold he has, but he's sure got a suspicious past. Have you heard, he might have been a—"

"I know, a smuggler," a broad, authoritative man shouldered his way into the conversation. "Look at him sometimes. He's capable of it. I just bet he's killed a man…"

"Well, I'd hardly say she's going to find him here," a woman with austerely plucked eyebrows and a sweetly loose tongue interrupted the pocket of hushed silence. "No one's ever seen him. Even at his own parties, have you ever seen…"

With the new addition, I detached, and chatted my way through the crowd. Idiots, indulging in idiotic gossip. The mass of people fit into every nook and cranny of the sub-ballroom of the house of a petty officer. Inherited money, I guessed, went into those golden gargoyles on the walls.

As well as something else, something a bit more tangible?

I grabbed a drink from the nearest server and strode over to the wall, positioning myself right under the gargoyle. I allowed a glazed look to enter my eyes and threw back my head as I ostensibly savored the drink, staring straight into the bottom of the neo-Gothic monstrosity.

Ah. Just as I had thought. Pinhole cameras. From the angle, they were bound to be watching a spot further down the wall to the right. I stretched out with the Force. Yes, there was definitely something that way. Something Noss didn't want anyone to find.

I wandered over to the right, somewhat disconcerted. It shouldn't be so easy. Not the job, obviously—the job was still ahead of me—but this aspect of simply slipping away. I fell into the currents of the half-dancing, half-chatting bureaucrats and with a little wishful thinking in the Force, found myself propelled towards my destination by a crowd that, despite all the women's dramatic, newly applied makeup, seemed remarkably faceless.

I hovered on the edge like a shy outcast wanting desperately to join a conversation. Really, though, I was more interested in the wall that fairly buzzed and leapt with danger behind my back than the incongruous cliques before my eyes. Insinuating talkatively. Plotting uselessly. Uselessly, because the Emperor knew the subtleties of their desire, and how to contain their sloshing of their emotions within the limits of reason. Channeling them to create order. Direction.

And I was his tool with which to direct them. I refracted just a hair of the crowd's pent-up frustrations back at themselves. Making them face the mirrors of their souls, so to speak.

Sometimes irony is so kriffing _fun_.

Misinterpreting the anger as mine, the gathering collectively spat out the standoffish visitor. Deliberately reeling, I backed up against the wall again, shaking my head mock-sadly and staring at the dregs of my drink.

There was a slight notch in the wall behind me—a hidden door, but one meant to be opened only in absolute solitude, not in the middle of a party. Blast! All my simulations had required that I make a deliberate lie to sneak away and access some safe or other from a back room.

Was there any back entrance? I slipped away, with no one noticing my absence from the faceless crowd. That would change, someday, and the crowd would grow faces and backgrounds and notice my absence, and my lies and plans would come in handy. But for now, I kept the stale but remarkably useful stories of sickness rolled up tight inside me, like the spray stick strapped to one leg and the lightsaber strapped to the other.

I crept through a back hallway leading out of the room and down two small, straight flights of stairs. But the farther I walked, the more distant the feeling of otherness and danger seemed. I thought back to the architectural plans I had studied of Noss' residence. The ballroom I had departed was a central room, with several passageways—including the one I was now in—radiating out from it like spokes to reach the diameter of the roughly cylindrical building. Logically, if there was a hidden room right behind the walls of the ballroom, walking this way would only take me farther away. And—I scanned the walls—there were no alternate entrances. Theoretically, I could cut my own secret tunnel.

For at least 20 feet through a metal wall.

Estimated time: About half an hour. Estimated noise level: Loud. Estimated chances that someone wouldn't notice me: about nil.

Plus, a lightsaber is not a power tool.

Passing through the hallway again, I went back into the ballroom. Well, I hadn't planned on having to break into a secret room in plain sight. This Noss was clearly clever, using public opinion, and its embodiment in the hordes of the elite, as a most lethal bodyguard.

I rejoined Rhode. "And where have you been, my dear madam? You simply…slipped away." His mustache crumpled—whether with bemusement or amusement, it was hard to say.

I guess my stories would come in useful after all. "I was simply trying out the local cuisine. The bartender here is…delightful." I wiggled my elegant glass, devoid of any remaining alcohol.

Rhode smiled. "Isn't he."

"So," he clasped my hand, seguing into the center of the floor, "how do you find Imperial Center?"

I was disappointed. An intelligent man, an admiral holding great command, and still, the usual platitudes. But I wouldn't be doing my job if it wasn't so. "It's lovely. They used to call it Coruscant, you know. They weren't wrong. The sheen…" I waved my hand vaguely, "on the buildings..."

He looked down, brushing off the cuffs on his uniform, which had acquired quite a gleam itself. "Indeed. Well, if you had lived here all of your life, you might not find it so…shiny. It's quite a gritty place, you know. We keep order as best we can."

_Yes_, I thought. _We do. And you do too, don't you? Thus the platitudes, thus the old courtesies. It's all a ritual, all a formula for order. _

_You fight the Empire's fight as well._

I barely even minded his obvious condescension as I eagerly, half-sincerely gazed at him. I expected him to curl his eyes around the tendrils of hair I was twisting in interest. I expected him to begin talking about his duties, or his work.

What I did not expect was for him to slowly, subtly start chuckling, as if he was urging me to join in the wait for something hilarious, and put one solid finger up to his lip. The fingers of the other hand, meanwhile, crept spiderlike towards his pocket and withdrew a small computer chip.

Immediately, I identified it—and knew Rhode must certainly have identified me. From the way my face twisted with recognition upon seeing the canister of top-secret issue Imperial nerve gas, I gave myself away as no mere bauble. With the residue of a smile upon his face, he wound his way onto the fringe of the crowd and lifted a rebreather out of his left pocket with two fingers, offering it to me like he had offered his arm before. I (graciously?) accepted it and watched as he took one himself.

This occurred over the space of a few seconds, but it seemed to take hours for me to slowly move the rebreather toward my mouth and watch him do the same. My mind was a blur of confusion. A thought—command?—shot through. _An Imperial agent is ready for treason from any direction, Emperor's Hand._ Rebreather half in my mouth, I spun, swiftly kicking Rhode—or whoever—in the torso. With a grunt of agony, his grip on the container spasmed. It dropped and broke on the marble floor. "No!" I screamed, choking on a concentrated breath of the gas. I shoved the rebreather back in my mouth and bent over, coughing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the faintly yellow cloud of gas spreading through the hall, leaving the urbane guests twitching on the floor.


	4. Chapter 4

The sudden paralysis of everyone in the room seemed to galvanize me into action. I stood up. "All right, who are you and what do you want?"

"Oh," he leered with disappointment, mustache writhing across his face and the hazy room, "shouldn't you be thanking me for saving your life? You got lucky, you know. I don't always happen to carry rebreathers. Just…a stroke of chance."

"Look," I snarled. "I wouldn't think it counts as life-saving if you endanger my life in the first place, as well as the lives of about a hundred decent citizens!"

He frowned coyly. "What, no more nice girl persona? Subterfuge gone so soon, Mara—or whoever you are?"

"What?" I feigned innocence—poorly.

"Here's a tip, my dear madam: drunk people don't tend to remember the denotation of the adjective 'coruscant'. And good Imperial citizens don't tend to know the former name of Imperial Center."

"Good Imperial officers don't tend to pull out military-issue nerve gas at a cocktail party, my dear sir," I shot back.

His good humor seemed to be undented. "So, what's your agenda? Who are you working for? Hutts? Black Sun? Or even," he waggled his fingers, "the Rebels?"

"Funny, I was about to ask you the same question."

Don't get me wrong, okay? I'm usually a master of the art of control. I've grown older, wiser since then. Now, I'd've taken out that man far earlier, and without a second thought. I wouldn't have stood around, listening to his arguments. I would have put him in his place with necessary force and responsible action.

"Me!" He drew himself up to his full height, which suddenly looked a lot smaller. "I am nothing but a loyal citizen, doing the best I can with what resources I—" He stopped, cut off by my sudden, piercing, hysterical laughter.

Okay, clearly I wasn't about to pull "necessary force and responsible action" on him, but looking on this as an outsider for the first time, I think I could have at least said something to make him stop, or at least cut him off. Necessary force of words, you know?

Because, don't get me wrong. Wit is great. I'm a big fan of wit. Especially the caustic variety.

But sometimes, when a man literally knocks out 79 people and then starts lecturing you, the Emperor's Hand, about loyal citizenry, there are only choking spasms of laughter. Even I run out of snark sometimes.

He grabbed me by the arm and yanked me over slumped-over lumps. "Ouch!" I noted, though actually his grip was nothing. "Where's the chivalry now?"

We burst through clouds of misty smoke that blocked everything in the room (including, I noted, the gargoyles) into the hall where I had gone before, and down the stairs. "Is there a?..." he muttered, dropping to his knees and scanning the wall with his fingertips.

"No," I sighed, skimming surface thoughts off his mind. "And no, I don't know what it is either. Come on, let's cut our way into the wall."

He tersely pulled out a vibroblade and made his way over to the creamy wallpaper of the room, managing to carve a few new pretty patterns in his efforts. I laughed at him. "Hold on a moment. We're going for the same thing, aren't we?"

"That," he said. "In," he gulped, "there."

"That thing," I agreed.

"Yes."

"Do you even know what it is you're getting into?"

"I may not know the name of the thing behind that wall, but I know—I just know, and there's no use telling me or talking some order into me—that there's something important in there. Something dangerous."

"Something alive," I wrapped up his series of ominous platitudes. "Something hidden." I snorted. "I wasn't really talking about what's hidden behind the wall. I mean—do you know what you're doing in dealing with me?"

He stood, almost as paralyzed as his victims strewn who were strewn all over the other room, just barely touching the tip of his vibroblade to a peeling crack in the wall. "No," I said. "I'm not with the Hutts, or Black Sun, or the Rebels. But I'm going for the same thing as you." I straightened up, walking in semicircles behind his hunched back. "I'm generally an efficient woman, Rhode. Do you want to know you're working against me now, or later? Do you want to fight me for this now…or after we've gotten it?"

His pinched face underwent a gradual change as he saw the expression in my eyes. "I'd say…later?"

"Very funny," I said, and swung, chopping at his solar plexus with a ridgehand while sweeping my right leg into the back of his ankles, leaving him spread-eagled on his back. "Wrong answer. Care to guess again?"

"Well," he groaned deliberately, eyes blearily focusing at a spot on the ceiling, "I suppose…"

Unbelievable. Even with no one around, the man was stalling.

"that the expected answer is _now_…"

I pulled a blaster on him. "Which should be obvious from the context," I murmured.

"but, I'm not sure…"

With one thumb, I flicked the safety off my blaster and started advancing it towards his face.

"that we can't find a third option…"

_Being that Adan Rhode is sadly shot while delivering a prone impromptu demonstration of the Kitonak speech patterns?_ No, sorry, my thought. Most likely not his. I burst in. "Which is?"

He smiled just like he had before he released the nerve gas. "That we already have, and you've lost." He looked down at the ground and suddenly stomped down on the floor tile third from the wall.


	5. Chapter 5

A white nexus of force sprang down from the ceiling. It took me a second to absorb the purpose of the initially indeterminate glow around me, which soon resolved into eddies and channels of interference patterns.

Ray shields. I was stuck.

But then again, so was he.

"Wow," I remarked. "You are definitely a smart one." Sometimes simplest is best.

He nodded. "A security team will be coming along in a few minutes. They'll get it, if I can't. This is their signal."

I snorted. "A team of whom? And why do you care anyway?"

"What is this, the I'm-hopelessly-stuck-in-ray-shields-so-I-might-as-well-interrogate-my-captor approach?"

"You're my captor? Right, cause you're not stuck here right along with me. Still on the floor, might I add. And I still have a blaster. Your situation has not fundamentally improved. In fact, it's probably gotten worse. Ray shields can be pretty boring, you know. There's not much to do…" I waggled the blaster back and forth in front of him.

"Just try it," he replied placidly.

I blinked. Was he serious? I couldn't…

Coolly, before he had a chance to rethink, I shifted my blaster and shot the ground next to him. Or, at least, I did theoretically. I stared at the blaster in stunned disbelief; the characteristic burst of red life and moan of pain did not accompany my finger's twitch.

"It's a new type of ray shield," he stated laconically and struggled to a sitting position, loosely clasping his knees. "So, now that we're on an equal footing—" I raised my fist. "—I mean, semi-equal, now that it wouldn't particularly benefit you to knock me out here, why are _you_ here?"

My face wrinkled. "I was ordered to come, to retrieve an object."

"Ah," he nodded sagely. "So you're a thief?" His face crinkled. "You should know that this is much more important than money. This involves—" he leaned forward, whispering as if the cocoon of radiation around us could overhear. "This involves the hidden secrets of the Jedi themselves!"

I smiled coldly. Clearly this man was a rebel, seeking to reclaim the old knowledge of the Jedi. It was a useless pursuit—Force skills could only go so far without a certain genetic background, and a certain amount of self-reliance. Even with the best instruction, one of those party-goers, for example, would never gain any amount of skill.

I sized up the man sitting across from me. Would he be able to get anywhere with this information, or was stopping him not even worth it?

Well, he had clearly had the Empire's most faultless training. He was calm, if perhaps needlessly possessing a certain dramatic smoothness. The fact that he had planned this entire operation in Noss's home, presumably without his knowledge, while still remaining Noss's friend, said something. He seemed serious, driven.

Definitely a threat. But an unevaluated one, as yet.

"All right," I said. "Explain."

He crossed his arms, debating whether to tell me. A miasma of half-cool appraisal trickled out through the Force. His eyes shot—calmly, wonderingly, with a noticeable lack of darting panic—to my gun and back.

I quickly added, "And, whether you like it or not, you'll have to give me the backstory if you're ever expecting to ally with me." There. A combination of Force perception, behavioral psychology, and adept inferences had just given me the appearance of being able to read the very depths of his plannings. All the more reason for him to spill.

"Do you know what Order 66 was?"

I answered promptly. "An order from the Emperor to his clone troopers to suppress the Jedi uprising."

"Was it successful?"

"Completely. Yes."

"Ah—" he shook his head. "That's what they'd have you believe."

"They who?"

"The Empire. The mechanics of government that keep us all in a neat line under their thumb. The ones who control." He caught the skeptical look on my face and said, "I know. You think I sound crazy, like the conspiracy theorists who go door-to-door. 'Aliens from another galaxy are coming to get me! They're chasing me with their moving planet and they'll kill us all if you don't give me some money! The government is covering this all up, I swear!' A high distrust of authority is never trusted itself; absolute principles seem too hasty."

"It's not that, actually. I do think you sound crazy, but more multiple-personality disorder than paranoiac."

"How do you mean?"

"It's ironic. It's really ironic," the tides of some powerful emotion throbbed under my voice, "you came into this party the perfect token for order and progress." I glared at him, slowly taking out a small cosmetic mirror from my purse and pointing it at him. "Look at yourself, Rhode. Look at your uniform, and what it stands for. And now look at yourself, and your actions." I dropped the mirror on the floor, grinding it into shards with my stiletto.

"And now what? Sometimes we have to work against the clutter and bureaucracy of society in order to serve…the true purpose of the rules. What have I done that's so disorderly? Merely stun a segment of society that would only cause more panic and chaos, were they allowed to interfere. In this case, I have only helped them. Insofar as they deserve to be helped, of course." He smiled. "You're…well, I don't know, but some sort of Imperial operative who works outside the immediate military. Don't think you won't do any shady, underhanded things in your career, Mara Jade. Don't think that for a second."

I considered him for a moment. "Fine. What's your overriding purpose? What's your justification? If you were really serving the Emperor, you wouldn't have to create mass terror like this."

"Mass terror?" He looked hurt. "Why, I am preventing mass terror! By taking a dangerous artifact out of the hands of a useless, artless, spineless high society! And," he hissed, "out of the hands of a regimented, fuzzy-thinking ISB—which is just as bad."

"That's ridiculous. How can you despise both the bourgeoisie and the means of bringing them to some higher level? Without the military, the ISB, the Emperor's defense machine—there would be no need for the rich at all. By funding the government, we allow their wealth and energy to go to the higher purpose that they themselves cannot fuel. They symbolize the Empire's prosperity at its most shallow levels, but the military does the real work. Trust me, if the military can control the relentless quibbles of high society, it can control your supposed artifact with discretion." An idea struck me, and I sat down, beginning to slowly remove my heels and dress to reveal the practical, armored outfit underneath. "And besides, without the military, who could hold the Empire together, as a thing to serve, not just an abstract concept? What would I, and thousands of loyal citizens, serve?" Another idea, more intangible, hit me as well. "What would you have to fight and define yourself against?"

He pondered my question a moment. Seizing the opportunity, I shoved the pile of cloth that had been my ruby ball gown into his hands. "Would you mind taking this?" I asked. "I'd like to get comfortable."

"Not at all," he replied. "Double-dressing, huh. You're some kind of agent." Surreptitiously (or not so much), he began feeling through the folds of fabric for anything dangerous.

And found it. A sharp object pierced his finger. "Kark!" he swore and threw the bundle against the wall of the ray shield. My dagger shot through the air, as well as fragments of the mirror which I had surreptitiously swept up, the red blaze of the fabric, whirling through the air—and a smoke grenade.

I knew from my study of the building that guards pretty much left the inner rooms alone, so as not to disturb the nonstop partying. But these outer halls were patrolled; men walked around the circumference of the building virtually constantly. And from a distance—

"Fire!" a voice barked. Through the haze, which remained trapped in the ray shields to build up a dense, glowing cylinder, I could make out figures manipulating a control panel in the wall.

And suddenly the haze dissipated, tendrils creeping along the floor. Before it was completely gone, I shot my now-functional blaster into the dress, igniting the fabric with a real blaze just in time for the guards to run up and extinguish it.

Mildly burned, cut, and exhausted, Rhode sunk to the floor, gasping in pain. The guards ran up. "Are you okay, sir?"

"Go to the center room. Treat the crowd of people he paralyzed. Take him to a detention facility," I said. "Then worry about his health."

They gaped. "Didn't you hear me?" I demanded. "You are security guards, aren't you? Then you are from a branch of the Imperial Military, and obliged to follow my orders!"

"C-c-clearance," one stuttered.

"Hapspir, Barrini, Corbolan, Triaxis," I sighed. "If you don't know what that means, call your superiors. Then follow my orders!"

Rhode coughed and stood up. "I'm afraid that won't work, my dear madam."

"Yeah? Why not?"

"They're my men." The three security guards shuffled into position, flanking Rhode and facing me with ominously bland looks. "I hope you're not surprised. Imperial guards are tools like any other." Looking remarkably unoffended, a gray-suited guard passed Rhode a piece of paper, and he examined it for a few seconds before looking up. "And you're coming with me. I've obtained plans to the building." My mouth opened, and he raised a finger. "No, not the official ones. Noss's own." He looked down again for a few minutes, then lifted his head.

"My dear madam, you wouldn't happen to know anything about scaling buildings?"


	6. Chapter 6

Rhode huffed and puffed, the thin metallic cable of a grappling hook digging into his fingers as he tried to raise himself above the ledge of the window.

I agilely followed with a grappling hook one of his "guards" had handed me, and I soon caught up with him. "What are you looking for?" I could have used the spray stick that so tantalizingly lay attached to my leg, but I rather enjoyed Rhode's pain. I was justified, I felt. Besides, the climb isn't that—my rope jinked wildly as a torrent of wind flooded the air, and I desperately snatched the nearest ledge—_bad_.

Oblivious to my near-fall, Rhode looked puzzled. "I thought we had established that we were searching for the same thing."

"We? For the record," I yelled over the gust of wind buffeting me, "if you're so intent on looking for this thing, I'm not so sure why you're taking me along. I mean, you know I'm taking it out from under you, right?"

"I can't hear you," he shouted. "My," he panted, "long-term goal hasn't changed. Right now, we're looking for an opening. A passage that will take us into Noss's chamber. It's disguised as a window."

Once again, I realized, this Noss was smarter than I thought. You'd have to be suicidal to climb on the outside of a building to reach his secret passage.

Suicidal came with my job description.

So who _was_ this Rhode?

As we climbed, Rhode pointed out a window.

"That one."

"Are you sure?"

"See that camera?"

"Yes," I cautiously said.

"It captures everything out here and broadcasts it to a hologram inside. That way people don't realize that the room only has five windows in it."

"Oh, so the window right next to the camera…"

"Is the true passage, yes. Can you get it open?"

"You're asking me?"

"You seem quite competent," he pointed out. I snorted. _Quite competent_… _Watch this!_

A bit of Force pressure, and the window collapsed in on itself with a blinding shatter just as Rhode and I reached the window sill. I dove through the window, somersaulting forwards and landing in a deep lunge, knees flexed. My eyes flicked through the room; nothing. I crisply motioned Rhode forwards.

And then a team of pallid Imperial security guards burst out of the woodwork.

I drew myself up to my full height, gathering the Force around me like a cloak. This Force skill was always most difficult for me. Waving my hand, I intoned, "You do not—"

"No!" Rhode burst in, and the guards raised weapons. My lightsaber was out and blazing in a nanosecond, and I cursed Rhode for breaking my concentration.

He practically read my mind (or the furious look on my face). "Don't bother with that," he said. "Look."

"We…we do not see anything," one of the gray-suited men stammered, and, as one, all the guards shrunk back into the walls.

We passed the guards silently. "Huh," I said, once we were out of earshot. "I could have sworn I never finished that Force trick."

"And yet they said exactly what you would have ordered." He nodded as we walked along. He surveyed the thick walls, seemingly designed as blast doors. Thick chunks of metal distorted the passageway, causing it to wind off into angular blurs in the distance. Consulting the map once more, he pushed on a small chunk in the wall. It receded. "Who's more foolish, the weak-minded fool susceptible to Force suggestion, or the weak-minded fool who follows him?"

"You didn't know about those guards, did you?"

"That's the Imperial hierarchy, Mara. One weak-minded fool follows another, until the entire system is stagnant. How pathetic is that—they didn't even require coercion! The social structure operates in exactly the same way."

"So they can't be trusted with this dangerous article. You've come to…take it off their hands, because you, as a revolutionary, are so much more responsible."

"My dear madam, I'm not more responsible as a revolutionary. I'm more responsible than those fools as a person. And I believe you are too."

"You believe me?" In a snap of intuition, it came to me. "That was a test; you knew those guards were there."

"Of course it was a test."

"You just wanted the opportunity to lecture me on the evils of the bureaucracy. To see if I was intelligent enough to understand that 'the Empire is damaged and must be destroyed for its own good.'"

"But you _passed_ the test. By the look on your face, I could see your disdain for those Imperial scum. Why the tone of anger?"

"Because _you_ failed."

"I?"

"Not catching the true disgust on my face for the Imperials the first time. Especially your willingness to use the 'Imperial scum' for your own purposes." He looked confused. "When you got out of the ray shields? Smacks of failure, Rhode."

He stammered. "That—that was a necessary, temporary measure."

"Showing me the evils of following a superior while depending on those who follow you? Then disrupting my plan and expecting me to follow your lead into a brace of armed men?" Rhode broke his previously determined stride as we wound down the corridors. I stopped, too, and pointed at him. "Smells of the puppetmaster."

"I'm—I'm not…"

I interrupted him, looking at the map over his shoulder. "Come on, we're wasting time. Next right and activate the trapdoor. We're going to have to go down again."

The Force sense was closer. An encrustation of ice practically suffused the flowing lines of metal in the room. Rhode, perhaps subconsciously feeling something he could not truly sense, shuddered, and something in his face seemed to snap into position. "Of course, my dear. You lead the way."

All the switches from classic Imperial gentleman to impassioned, tirading demagogue—this man's emotions were all over the map, distorting even the foreboding sense of power deep within the building. Judging on his genuine discomfort at his own hypocrisy, I would guess he had fooled even himself.

Important for me to stay two steps ahead, then.

I caught sight of the trapdoor. "Stay back." Cautiously, I depressed the button and waited for the trapdoor (it was a _trap_door, after all) to slam itself at breakneck speed down some chasm, possibly with some sparks of electricity thrown in for good measure. Pulling out my climbing rope, I prepared to wait a moment, rappel down, and avoid unnecessary injury.

That was not what happened.

The walls of the corridor from which we had come slid aside with a whir, and a legion of battle droids came out.

A barrage of blaster bolts hurdled toward my head. Lightsaber out and blazing, I deflected three shots back at the group of droids. Three dropped. Suddenly, another bolt came from behind me. I whirled, expecting more droids, only to find that Rhode had pulled out a blaster and started shooting. Two droids dropped in front of me, then two more. He took up a defensive stance slightly behind me and to my right.

"The door's opening!" he yelled. I couldn't spare a glance down, but he was right. It'd start closing again any second if we didn't both get down there. But if I let down my guard for even an instant, the droids would get us both.

I motioned Rhode to my left. "Stay behind me and get through to the trapdoor!"

"What about you?"

"Oh, I'll be along. Go!" He fired three parting shots, and the machines in front of me fizzled and died. He sidestepped, placing himself directly behind me.

A droid took aim and fired at my head.

And I realized—

I threw myself to the floor, a scream of warning half vocalized in my mouth. The blaster bolt penetrated the original button that had released the droids, and they stopped in their tracks.

I turned around 360 degrees, slowly surveying the room. The trapdoor was frozen open, like the eyes of the startled droids. The wall was scorched and blackened. Wires hung out of the button.

Rhode lay ignominiously on the floor, panting hard. His mousy hair was literally blackened from the blaster bolt that had dropped right over him.

"Thank the galaxy for good reflexes," I wryly remarked.

He cursed, hard. "You almost _killed_ me."

"You have to learn to trust me, Rhode."

"This is no time for humor!" he spat. "You…you…."

I sighed. "Look, I figured hitting the button might deactivate the droids. They have to be controlled by a central computer. Shooting the wiring behind the button cut off the link. Thankfully, my estimation of the machinery was right. Plus, I knew you can duck fast."

Rhode cursed again.

I sighed again. Some people….


End file.
